Analyzing Albany's Audit Savings PR

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Albany Data Stories Note:  Albany’s Chief City Auditor, now Mayor, released three statements about the outcomes of their work between 2023-2025.  We had explored this in 2025 but didn’t publish an article.  We’re publishing this now as it seems topical for discussions related to the City of Albany’s financial issues.

Chief City Auditor Dr. Dorcey Applyrs Releases Statement Regarding Saving the City and Tax Payers $1.12M Dollars for FY 2023” – January 2024 https://www.albanyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/12095/Saving-Statement2023”

“For the 2023 calendar year, the Office of Audit and Control saved the City more than $1.12M; through a Forensic Utility Audit, and by identifying duplicate charges, ineligible expenses, and other miscellaneous errors during the voucher auditing process”

Chief City Auditor Dr. Dorcey Applyrs Releases Statement Regarding Saving the City and Tax Payers $4.09M Dollars for FY 2024” - December 2024 https://www.albanyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/12090/Saving-Statement-2024

“For the 2024 calendar year, the Office of Audit and Control saved the City more than $4.09M; through a Forensic Utility Audit, and by identifying duplicate charges, ineligible expenses, and other miscellaneous errors during the voucher auditing process”

2026 Proposed Budget - October 2025

[noting 2025 successes]  “Our Office saved the City over $8.7M by identifying duplicate invoices, ineligible expenses, and other related errors detected during the procurement auditing process.”

albanyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/13182/2026-Proposed-Budget-PDF?bidId=   pdf page 39

** Note that this statement was published prior to the close of the full year; we do not know if this was an estimate of the full budget year “savings”, or the “savings” through end of September 2025. 

Albany’s Chief City Auditor released statements on the outcomes of the Office of Audit and Control’s achievements for the budget years 2023, 2024, and 2025.  

The press releases were thin on details.  We wanted to understand two questions.  

1) Did these achievements represent “Savings”? 

2) What are the numbers that make up the yearly “Savings”?

Importantly, we know that the team at the Office of Audit and Control does important work.  This article is not a criticism about the achievements of the team, rather it is an exploration of how that work is characterized in press releases.

In accounting and risk management terms the activities of the Auditor’s Office should be termed "preventing loss" versus "cost savings" (actual, measurable reductions in current or existing expenses.)

An analogy.  If you go to the grocery store and find an item is on sale and purchase it at the sale price, that is “Savings”.  If you go to the grocery store and identify that the item you’re purchasing is incorrectly and unfavorably rung up, and you work with the cashier to prevent the mistake, that is “loss prevention.”

Use of the correct terms is important.  Using the term “Savings” in a citizen-focused press release misrepresents and exaggerates what was actually achieved by the Office of Audit and Control.  We will use the term "Loss Prevention" for the remainder of this article.

In the middle of 2025 we FOILed the data that backs up the 2023 and 2024 press releases.

For the 2023 data (image above) we received a rich spreadsheet of information for 2023 that included almost all of the information required to understand the auditing actions and results. 

The 2024 data (image below) came with only four fields - Amount Submitted, Amount Approved , Difference, and Notes; there was no information on Date Received, Department, Vendor, and Invoice Number.  We re-requested the complete dataset via FOIL and did not receive a reply. 

The 2023 data has 334 entries that detail individual actions taken by the Auditing team

• The value of the actions sum up to $1.114 million which aligns with the figure noted in the 2023 press release
• 226 of the actions are associated with the submission of duplicate invoices (approximately ⅔ of all actions)
• The median value of the actions is $161.50 
• 7 vendors have 5 or more auditing actions - Century Linen Services, Cintas Corp, WW Grainger, Cummins Sales and Services, Crisafulli Bros, Bound Tree Corporation and Central Hudson Gas & Electric.  We don’t know if this does or doesn’t have any meaning.

If we review the data by the value of the top actions (image above), we find 9 actions that have a value of over $10,000.  

• The action with the largest value is $756,782 with the vendor Roseenbauer Minnesota, LLC.  This action represents slightly over ⅔ of the 2023 loss prevention
• There are two actions associated with the Downtown BID
• There is one action associated with Badger Meter
• There are 5 actions with unknown vendors

Without detailed vendor data that lists out specific vendor and the invoices we cannot glean as much from the 2024 data.

• There are 324 auditing actions, that represent $3.639 million of value.  This is approximately $400k less than the press release statement
• The median value of the actions is $276
• There were 20 actions that had a value of over $10,000
• The highest value action was $2.25 million with an unknown vendor.  This action represented approximately 62% of the aggregate value of the year’s loss prevention

We set out to answer two questions:

1) Did the achievements noted in the press releases represent “Savings”? 

2) What are the numbers that make up the yearly “Savings”?

The achievements cannot be credibly referred to as “Savings”.  The accomplishments and work of the individual Office of Audit and Control team members is very important to protect our City’s finances, however the positioning of their work as “Savings” is either an intentional overreach or an incorrect positioning by someone not familiar with accounting and finance.

As an aside, the 2023 and 2024 savings press releases both refer to “savings” generated from the “Forensic Utility Audit”.  We do not know which vendors were covered by this result and the value of the loss prevention in 2023 and 2024.

Evaluating the numbers was also interesting and highlighted the detail-oriented work required of the Office of Audit and Control team.  We would suggest that the new Chief Auditor, should he decide to issue accomplishment-oriented press releases in the future, disclose the numbers that back up the press releases which will promote clarity and transparency.